I recently discovered that an inability to toggle between old-style and lining figures in certain fonts originates from the development of Mavericks. I have submitted a bug report through Apple.com, and I would appreciate other members of this forum submitting bug reports as well. You could just copy the first three paragraphs below and submit them as your text:

When the engineers reworked the Cocoa OpenType menu (the “typography” panel) in Mavericks, they assumed that every font’s default figures are lining. Because they’re making this erroneous assumption, they only look for the “Old-Style Figures” OpenType feature, and they completely ignore the standard “Lining Figures” OpenType feature.

This bug directly effects the preparation of financial and scientific documents. For example, if I want to use the fonts Harriet or Alright Sans, which have old-style figures as the default, I cannot toggle to lining figures for tables, graphs, or addresses. In fact, in Harriet and Alright Sans, the lining figures aren’t accessible at all because of this bug.

I’ve tested a number of OpenType fonts, including the OpenType benchmark Microsoft ClearType fonts, and I am 100% certain this is an Apple bug. The problem manifests itself in Nisus Writer Pro, Pages ’09, and TextEdit.

Below is a more technical description of the bug, which a local font developer provided. I hope you can help quickly resolve this bug with the engineers.